CHAPTER 1 Establishing Relations n the eve ning of December 1, 1991, Larry Napper, one of the OState Department’s foremost Soviet experts and destined to be the last director of its Office of Soviet Union Affairs, walked the streets of Kyiv. He had accompanied Assistant Secretary of State for Eu ro- pean affairs Thomas M. T. Niles to observe the in depen dence referen- dum that the Ukrainians had held earlier that day. The results of the vote streamed in, and they sent a resounding message. In the end, with a large turnout, more than 90 percent of the voters had opted for an in de pen dent state. Inde pen dence won even in Crimea, garnering 54 percent of the vote in the only part of Ukraine where ethnic Rus sians constituted a majority of the population. As Napper tracked the incom- ing vote tally and watched the reaction of Ukrainians in the capital, he quietly admired their inspirational act of self- determination and thought to himself: “It’s clear; the jig is up for the Soviet Union.” Washington now had to prepare urgently for the final collapse of its Cold War rival and the emergence of the New In de pen dent States, including Ukraine. And, after that happened, the U.S. government needed to get about the business of establishing a relationship with the new nation. 9 10 The Eagle and the Trident Ukraine’s Long and Complex History At its height in the early eleventh century, Kyivan Rus’ was the largest state in Eu rope. It entered a period of decline and fragmentation in the latter part of that century, culminating in collapse after the Mongol invasion. The Golden Horde sacked Kyiv in 1240. The city would not become a major population, po liti cal, and commercial center again until the 1800s. Parts of present-day Ukraine fell under the dominion of various other entities in the centuries after 1240: the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Ottoman Empire, Muscovy, the Crimean Khanate, Poland, the Rus sian Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire.1 As a result, the western regions of what is present-day Ukraine were affected by the politi cal, religious, and cultural influences that swept across Central Eu rope; what is now eastern Ukraine was not similarly affected. This history produced a country of regional differ- ences. Ethnic Ukrainians and Rus sians constitute the largest groups today, but Crimean Tatars, Belarusians, Bulgarians, Hungarians, Jews, Poles, and Romanians also make up sizable parts of the population. The Cossacks created a Hetmanate in what is now central Ukraine in 1648, which enjoyed a brief period of in de pen dence but did not de- velop the institutions of a con temporary state. Following the 1654 Treaty of Pereyaslav, much of modern Ukraine became part of the Rus sian Empire, while parts of western Ukraine found themselves in the Polish- Lithuanian Commonwealth, then the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and later again Poland. Crimea and the south remained a part of the Crimean Khanate until conquered by the Rus sian Empire in the late eigh teenth century. The bulk of Ukraine would remain a piece of the Rus sian Em- pire or the Soviet Union from 1654 until 1991, with the exception of the brief period from 1918 to 1921 in the chaotic aftermath of World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution.2 The twentieth century was not kind to Ukraine or its people. World War I and the Rus sian civil war between the Reds and the Whites were followed by the Great Famine under Joseph Stalin— Ukrainians called it the Holodomor (killing by starvation)—in which millions died. And few parts of the Soviet Union suffered more during World War II than the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, which lost some 15 percent of its population.3 Establishing Relations 11 One of the remarkable things about Ukraine is that the national identity stayed alive for so long— hundreds of years— absent a physical nation- state. As noted, for much of the time after the Golden Horde’s sacking of Kyiv, Ukraine was a part of the Rus sian Empire, which fur- ther solidified the intertwined historical, religious, and cultural links between Ukrainians and Rus sians, links that dated back to when both claimed the Kyivan Rus’ as their starting point. Those historical ties affected the views of both the Ukrainians and the Rus sians. Rus sians came to think of Ukraine as an integral part of their country, often refer- ring to Ukrainians as “ little Rus sians.” Indeed, when Rus sian president Vladimir Putin visited Kyiv in 2013 to mark the 1,025th anniversary of the Kyivan Rus’s ac cep tance of Chris tian ity, he pointedly said that Ukrainians and Rus sians were all one people. Putin’s comment, like the term “ little Rus sians,” infuriated Ukrainian nationalists, who liked to point out that it was a grand prince of Kyiv who founded Moscow in 1147.4 Views in Ukraine were more diverse. Those in the western part of the country tended to look toward Eu rope. The west was where Ukrai- nian nationalism was strongest, and those holding the memory of the Holodomor often continued to regard Moscow as an adversary. In east- ern Ukraine, where a higher proportion of the population was ethnic Russian— though Crimea is the only part of modern Ukraine in which ethnic Rus sians constitute a majority— the population had a more posi- tive view of Rus sia and of Rus sians, and they tended to see their identity linked more closely to Rus sia. Language reflected Ukraine’s mix: Ukrai- nian was more common in the west, while Russian—the language of the Soviet Union—was heard more frequently in the east and south. The number of those who regarded Rus sian as their first language far ex- ceeded the number of ethnic Rus sians, but most people in Ukraine, if they could not speak both languages, had a basic understanding of the other language. As will be seen, however, regional, linguistic, and eth- nic differences were swamped by the scale of the vote in favor of in de- pen dence in 1991. In the early 1990s, many saw Ukraine as divided into two parts: the west and center was one region, the east and south (including Crimea) the other. This division was based partially on language, though most Ukrainians were practical when it came to bridging language differ- ences; it was not uncommon to hear two people in conversation on the 12 The Eagle and the Trident street in which one spoke Rus sian and the other responded in Ukrai- nian. The perceived east- west difference also reflected the fact that the bulk of ethnic Rus sians, some 17 percent of the population in 1991, resided in the east and south. The east- west divide has some value for understanding Ukraine, but it is a useful prism only up to a point. In the years after 1991 the line between east and west began to blur; for example, po liti cal parties based in the east began to make some in- roads in the west and center in the 2000s, and vice versa. Although residents of the eastern areas such as Donetsk and Luhansk wanted good relations with Rus sia, polls in April 2014 showed that a large portion of the population in the east wished to remain part of Ukraine. An Empire Collapses In the run-up to its quiet end, the Soviet Union underwent dramatic changes during Mikhail Gorbachev’s time in the Kremlin. Perestroyka and glasnost— restructuring and openness— were his watchwords when he became general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1985. They foreshadowed his willingness to allow greater po- liti cal space and a degree of democracy and autonomy internally. The external changes in Soviet policy from 1985 to early 1991 were even more striking: conclusion of a treaty banning all U.S. and Soviet land- based intermediate- range missiles; withdrawal of Soviet troops from Af ghan i stan; ac cep tance of German unification and agreement to withdraw Soviet forces from the former German Democratic Republic; allowance of greater latitude for Warsaw Pact countries to determine their own po liti cal course, including no longer insisting on a leading role for the communist parties in those states; and then the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact itself. Gorbachev did not intend to bring down the Soviet Union, but the forces he unleashed did so. In the Caucasus, the dispute between Ar- menia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno- Karabakh weakened Moscow’s hold. The strongest push for inde pen dence arose in the three Baltic states— Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania— whose incorporation into the Soviet Union had never been recognized by the United States. As the Baltic states pushed for greater sovereignty and ultimate in depen dence, Establishing Relations 13 so did other Soviet republics. That included Ukraine, where Volody- myr Shcherbytskiy, head of the Ukrainian Communist Party and a conservative opponent of Gorbachev’s reforms, had resigned in 1989. The democracy movement, including the pro- independence Rukh Party, won an impressive 25 percent of the vote in the March 1990 election for the Verkhovna Rada (the Supreme Council of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, which would become Ukraine’s parliament; it is also referred to simply as the Rada). On July 16, 1990, the Rada adopted a declaration of state sovereignty, one month after a similar declaration had been approved by the Congress of People’s Deputies of the Rus sian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, under the chairmanship of Boris Yeltsin.